14. Millions of dollars invested in Linux and open-source companies by
venture capital firms in Q1 through Q3 of 2007: 226.7

15. Millions of dollars paid for XenSource (open-source virtualization)
by Citrix in August 2007: 500

16. Millions of dollars paid for Zimbra (open-source e-mail collaboration)
by Yahoo in September 2007: 350

17. Position of “Make Ubuntu laptops cheaper than Windows laptops (in all
countries)” among the most popular ideas at Dell IdeaStorm: 1

18. Position of “Make Linux and no operating system standard options on
all future products” among the most popular ideas at Dell IdeaStorm: 2

19. Position of “Put Ubuntu on the list of operating systems when
building a PC!” among the most popular ideas at Dell IdeaStorm: 3

20. Number of results of a search on dell.com for “linux”: 648

1–5: CNET.com

6: CNews Russian IT Review

7, 8: Phil Shapiro in
PCWorld.com

9–12: NetApplications.com, via Datamation

13, 14: The 451
Group, via InternetNews.com

15, 16: InternetNews.com

17–19:
DellIdeaStorm.com on October 11, 2007

20: Dell.com on October 11, 2007

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

Sega's Dreamcast serial bus provides a proprietary interface for mice,
keyboards and other peripherals on that architecture. Adrian
McMenamin recently posted a patch supporting that interface, and also
added support for the Dreamcast keyboard. Users now can interact with
Dreamcast after they have booted Linux on it successfully.

One consistent problem with Linux is an ever-burgeoning growth of
compile-time warnings. Many of these don't indicate a serious problem,
so developers tend to perform only the fixes that will make their code
actually work, leaving any remaining warnings still clinging to the
compiler output. Every once in a while, some brave soul goes through
the great mass of the kernel source tree, scraping off as many
warnings as possible. Satyam Sharma did it this time, spending a
weekend slogging through the tree. The result is that now the truly
significant warnings will be more visible in the compiler output, and
developers will have an easier time debugging their code. Inevitably,
warning cruft will build up again, until someone takes another weekend
to play kernel dentist and scrape them off once more.

Marc Espie recently voiced the longtime
concern among BSD folks that
Linux people have been taking unfair advantage of the right to
relicense BSD code or to choose only the GPL to cover dual-licensed
code. He said this meant people were not “giving back” to the BSD
community by making sure the code could not be reused in BSD- or
ISC-licensed code. Marc's (and others') argument was that people
should be “ethical” about how they utilize the terms of the BSD or ISC
license. But, BSD people often tout this very difference between the
BSD-type licenses and the GPL as showing that the BSD licenses are
“freer”. Saying it's unethical for people to make use of
that freedom makes it seem as though the BSD people want to have it
both ways. They want the “giving back” features of the GPL,
and
they want to retain the ability to criticize the GPL as being “less free”. The
solution is simple—use a license that does what you want, instead of
hoping naively that everyone agrees that what you want is what
they should do.

Zhang Rui noticed that some drivers were creating identically named
files in a single directory of the /proc filesystem. This was clearly
not how things should be, so he posted a patch to return an error
message if any driver attempted to create a file that already existed
in that tree. But, as it turns out, you can't just do that. As Andrew
Morton said, Zhang's change would cause a lot of currently working
systems to break suddenly, as drivers would find their previously
successful actions no longer to be successful. Oliver Neukum also
told Zhang that merely preventing the files from being created—as
Zhang's patch did—would simply hide the fact that all these file
duplication bugs existed in the driver code. At Andrew's suggestion,
therefore, Zhang submitted a new patch to detect the
duplication and create a warning message in the system logs. This
would make it easier for the driver maintainers to fix the broken code
themselves over time.

IDE-CD and IDE-SCSI both have been orphaned. Alan Cox had been
maintaining IDE-CD, but he gradually lost interest in that
architecture and didn't really have the hardware anymore anyway. He
posted a call for someone to step up as maintainer, and when no one
did after a week and a half, submitted a patch to mark IDE-CD as
orphaned. Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz made the same patch for IDE-SCSI.
It's possible, as Jens Axboe suggested at one point in the discussion,
that these drivers might be folded into the main IDE subsystem code
for easier maintenance.

It's often the case, especially for relative newcomers to kernel
development, that people try to submit a patch to the mailing list,
only to discover that their e-mail client has wrapped lines,
converted tabs to spaces or vice versa, or that they've submitted the
patch as an attachment instead of inline and so on. Some of these
problems can be avoided directly, but problems with the e-mail client
can be a surprise to users who think they've been careful and done
everything right. Randy Dunlap recently wrote up a document describing
how to configure the various e-mail clients for as few unpleasant
surprises as possible. Jeff Garzik had asked him to do it. Randy's
initial draft contained a fair bit of advice and configuration
information and was met with a barrage of additional information from
users of various e-mail clients—clearly a welcome document whose
time has long since arrived.

Linux Planned for a Majority of New Embedded Projects

“Linux in the Embedded Systems Market” is the latest report from VDC on
developments in the embedded systems market, and it shows huge future
advances for Linux in a category it already leads. Figures 1 and 2 (from
VDC, vdc-corp.com) are two pie charts
that tell an interesting story.

Figure 1. Operating System Used on the Previous Project

Figure 2. Operating System Planned for the Next Project

The report lists a number of reasons engineers increasingly favor Linux.
These include, “royalty-free run-time costs, advanced networking
capabilities and technical features, the large base of engineers familiar
with the Linux operating system, as well as many other factors”.

But the reasons hardly matter. These results are not only about share of
market, or even share of mind. They're also about minds that are already made
up. For embedded development purposes, Linux is the practical choice. End
of story. The next question is “How much more great embedded work will get
done because the standard is now clear?”

They Said It

What's most fascinating to me is that members of the public have no clue
that they're not using Windows. They're able to load up their Microsoft
Word files using OpenOffice.org, and save them back to disk automatically in MS
Word format. They surf the Web, check e-mail, do instant messaging, view
YouTube videos, visit their Facebook pages, learn touch-typing skills and
lots more. Our public library has been offering these Linux public stations
for the past three years. People come up to me and ask, “What does Linux look
like?” and I answer them with a straight face, “The computer you've been
using for the past two hours is Linux.”

Google empowers its people to try things out, to put them “in
beta”. And it
leaves them there even when they're not pulling their financial weight,
because someone else may come along with a Clue, and the cost of leaving a
server running is a rounding error. By letting people pound on its ideas in
public, in other words, Google saved a ton of money...

Regardless of its modest market share in absolute terms, the fact that
Linux more than doubled suggests it is growing at a collision course with
the other OSes. If it were to maintain its current growth rate, it would be
the dominant OS by the year 2014.

More from Less

We've come a long way since March 2003. That was when Paul Otellini of
Intel (then COO, now CEO) was on stage at PC Forum, promoting the chip
giant's new Centrino brand. I was the first questioner, and I pressed him
to stop dragging the company's feet on Linux issues, especially device
drivers (see www.linuxjournal.com/article/6794). His response was not encouraging.

Now, almost five years later, a Google search for Linux Intel device
drivers brings up more than six million results. Today, Intel pushes Linux
as much as Linux pushes Intel. A good example of the former is
LessWatts.org, a new community launched by Intel to improve power
management on Linux.

Says the index page, “LessWatts.org is not about marketing, trying to sell
you something or comparing one vendor to another. LessWatts.org is about
how you can save real watts, however you use Linux on your computer or
computers.”

Among the projects featured are the PowerTOP toolkit, “tickless
idle”,
Power Policy Manager, Linux BLTK (Battery Life Toolkit), display and
graphics power saving, device and bus power management and so on. It's
also part of Intel's Climate Savers initiative (at
climatesaverscomputing.org).

Bug Labs Debugs the Hardware Business

Bug Labs is a startup with the laudable (and long overdue) ambition of
making hardware building “just as easy as writing software or Web
applications”. That's from the index page. Dig down and find that
“Bug Labs
envisions a future where CE stands for Community Electronics, the term
'mashups' applies equally to hardware as it does to Web services, and
entrepreneurs can appeal to numerous markets by inventing 'The Long Tail'
of devices.” In an early blog entry, Bug Labs CEO Peter Semmelhack added,
“It's Legos meets Web services and APIs. Imagine being able to build any
gadget you wanted by simply connecting simple, functional components
together. Now imagine being able to easily program, share and connect these
gadgets in interesting ways...”

At the heart of the system is the BUGbase, described as “a fully
programmable and 'hackable' Linux computer, equipped with a fast CPU, 128MB
RAM, built-in Wi-Fi, rechargeable battery, USB, Ethernet and small LCD
with button controls. It also has a tripod mount because, well, why
not?”

What matters most here, second only to Bug Labs' ambitions, is its beliefs
and practices around Linux and open source. Adds cofounder Peter
Semmelhack, “In essence, we're building an open-source-based platform for
programmers to build not only the applications they want but the hardware
to run it on.”

I asked Peter to provide some technical background that would interest
Linux Journal
readers. Here's his response:

Every piece of code on the BUG is GPL or GPL-compatible. The pieces
from the OSS world that we've leveraged (or are leveraging) are on our
Web site here: www.buglabs.net/oss_list. We are using Linux 2.6.19.
In addition, the hardware schematics, BOMs and so forth will be made freely
available to encourage users to hack, extend and enhance it.

For our interface between the hardware and software worlds, we chose to
use RESTful Web services. This way, it's easy to mash up the data coming
from the modules with any other Web service. Think of all the cool things
you could do if you could mash up the camera on your cell phone, the
lat/lon from your car's GPS and Flickr, and so on. Right now, that's
impossible,
but with our architecture, it's pretty straightforward. It's like any other
software mashup. Our SDK/IDE essentially is an Eclipse plugin and offers
an integrated, visual way to configure and program your BUG. It also
provides a window into BUGnet—our community site—where you can copy
applications to/from, rate existing apps, participate in forums and so on.

There are three pieces to the BUG “experience”: the BUG hardware, the
Eclipse SDK/IDE and BUGnet. They all work seamlessly together as a whole
product out of the box. Lastly, I want to mention that while we chose Java
as the language to launch with, there is nothing stopping engineers from
using whatever other language they're comfortable with: C, C++ and so forth. We
intend to have explicit support for those in the SDK/IDE shortly.

The Bug Labs site and blog are also full of references to free software and
open source (they're especially fond of Ubuntu) and invitations to
participate in both the FOSS value system and Bug Labs' development
community. Check it out at buglabs.net.

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